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Making its English debut in the 16th century, ‘quarantine’ derived from quarantina, which meant ‘40 days’ in Italian. This was the time a recent widow could stay in her husband’s former home. In the next century, it denoted a period of isolation of the potentially contagious for 40 days. Eventually, the word came to mean isolation of undefined duration, its modern sense. For example, in 1663, Samuel Pepys wrote in his famed diary of having all ships originating in plague-infected places ‘perform their Quarantine, for 30 days’.
Two American presidents became strongly connected to the word in military contexts. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) made metaphorical use of it during an October 1937 speech. American isolationism was very strong, despite the malign involvement
of Germany in Spain and Japan in China. Roosevelt warned that America should join with other countries to oppose their aggression.
Roosevelt’s analogy for the predicament was this: ‘When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.’ FDR left ‘quarantine’ undefined. He insisted that he wasn’t contemplating military involvement. But it would not suffice to be passive in the face of overseas aggression; America must be active in keeping the peace.
Decades after FDR’s ‘Quarantine Speech’, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, President John F Kennedy proclaimed the imposition of a ‘strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment’ going to Cuba on Soviet ships in response to the installation of nuclear-missile sites there. ‘Quarantine’ was well-chosen. Though a blockade had indeed been declared, a ‘quarantine’ could be portrayed as something not rising to the level of an outright act of war.
